When I was about five years old, I was already reading The Hardy Boys and even though my vocabulary wasn’t in full bloom, all the equipment was there. I remember reading a novel about Grizzly Adams in which, in conjunction with a bad guy suddenly being on the scene, Adams “turned around and found himself looking down the nose of an evil-looking snub-nosed revolver.” I had just finished reading “Snakes Do The Strangest Things” and I thought that the “snub-nosed revolver” must be a cousin to the “hog-nosed viper,” and I figured the creep must be some kind of snake-handler. Didn’t detract from the thrilling story for me, but I wonder how many times I “filled in” details with guesses about words I didn’t know. There were pictures in that book, mainly a bunch of color photos from the tv-show all together in the center of the book, not particularly relevant to the story at hand, but great for seeing just how big Ben was when he stood on his back feet.

One day that same year I went to another kids house who lived a couple of blocks away and he showed me his comic books. He had a stack of around 20, and I wanted to borrow some. This was 1976, and the comics were all super-hero themed, but I don’t remember them being about the basic SuperWonderBatSpider friends. My mom didn’t let me take them home since most of them were sort of creepy-looking. I don’t think I would have wanted my very young sons looking at them either.

But a few years later I was reading Archy, Jughead and Scrooge McDuck comics with my siblings. And those were the family comics, along with Far Side, Calvin and Hobbes and a Wizard of Id collection we had kicking around. I remember my dad wanting to get us the bound Prince Valiant anthologies, but I don’t think he was able to till I was already moved out. I know I bought a couple for my younger brothers when I was in grad school. When I was a teen we got all the Tintin and Asterix and Obelix comics. Did the latter prepare me for learning Latin? Probably not, but may have helped me fake it. Did you know there was a live-action Asterix & Obelix movie starring Gerard Depardieu and Roberto Benigni?

Now a lot of guys in my generation have read comics and graphic novels far more widely than I have, and if you are one of those, bear with my gross overgeneralizations about certain books and my ignorance about others. I’m just writing about my own experience with the genre, and there’s not much of it. But some readers might find this an accessible entrance into that world. That’s what I’m shooting for.

In college I bought only two picture narratives: Maus and Watchmen. Maus, written/illustrated by Art Speigelman, was basically the biography of the author’s father, a Holocaust survivor, told through the medium of illustration. Mice portrayed the Jewish characters, cats the German, pigs the Polish, and so on. Very powerful story, and powerful in the medium. I place it on the same level as Primo Levi and other great Holocaust witnesses. On another note, H and I went and saw Speigelman give a talk at UCLA a couple of years ago after publication of his book In the Shadow of No Towers and I found him exasperating. I love his artistic genius, but he almost seemed a parody of himself, like one of the characters Woody Allen plays.

Watchmen was more a super-hero comic, but crossed with the anti-heroic modern novel: the characters are dysfunctional and sometimes their personal and interpersonal problems loom much larger than whatever plots are being hatched. It had a lot of depth to it. Enough for Time Magazine to name it in the top 100 novels written since 1923, fwiw. It’s a classic in the graphic novel genre, and I enjoyed it a lot. Somehow I lost it during my move back to California, and I haven’t repurchased it. Most libraries have it.

A couple of years ago I bought some…well, can you call a 200-page illustrated book a “graphic novel” if it’s non-fiction? Anyway, I bought several graphic memoirs. The first was an account of the Bosnian-Serb conflict called Safe Area: Gorazde, by Maltese writer Joe Sacco. It details sitting around in basements smoking, eating or starving with refugees and then illustrates the personal stories of those the narrator spends time with. The stories center around the experiences of the Muslims living in Gorazde, an area that was designated a protected area by the United Nations, but which was nearly wiped out by the Serbian ethnic cleansing program. It’s a serious story, some sort of combination between a transcription of oral accounts and a mental photojournalism project. Sacco did a similar book on Palestine several years back, but I haven’t read it.

The other graphic memoir I picked up was Blankets by Craig Thompson. He published the book when he was 28, and it details his evangelical upbringing, his first love, and the tension he experienced between his faith and his artistic gifts. It’s a profoundly honest story, well-drawn, and sometimes hard to read. It’s probably one of H and my favorite books now, despite Thompson’s ambivalence about faith. We wish we could spend time with him.

I also stumbled on Doug TenNapel’s Creature Tech around the same time. TenNapel has been one of my greatest pleasures. He tells the sort of stories I would like to tell, and his comics are full of unapologetic creative fight action and at the same time are about how his heroes develop virtue. The front of Creature Tech gives a list of people TenNapel would like to thank, and some of them are faculty at Talbot Seminary. TenNapel was also the creator of EarthWorm Jim, a wacky comic/cartoon/video-game character that had a lot in common with The Tick. The plot of Creature Tech is plain crazy, with the enfleshed ghost of a Gold-Rush era villain trying to use a scrap of the Shroud of Turin to resurrect a giant space eel to ravage Modesto and the world, but a local reverend/scientist is determined to stop him. His other books, Earthboy Jacobus and Tommysaurus Rex are equally awesome. Hollywood seems determined to turn all his books into movies, and the rights to Creature Tech and Tommysaurus Rex have already been bought, from what I’ve read.

Around the same time I bought Safe Area Gorazde, H bought me a hardbound copy of McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern that was dedicated to exposing the reader to the history of literary comics through a combination of essays and samples from many of the acknowledged masters of the medium. I browsed it a few times, but realized that I’m not really interested in knowing comics as a genre. I just see some that I like and get them and feel a bit apologetic about the fact that there is so much in the genre I really don’t care for. There’s value in breadth of love, in fostering fresh appreciations for things previously unknown, but life’s too short to waste it on things that don’t make the true/beautiful cut, as arbitrary as my standard for it might be. And to bring it down to earth, most books have to make the OK to have around the kids cut.

This last week H and I picked up a few more books, some of which I’ve read already. The first is The Wizard’s Tale illustrated by David Wenzel. It’s a fun high-fantasy with great art. The story is about an evil wizard from a long line of evil wizards who finds it difficult to be effectively evil and is actually embarrassingly tenderhearted. It’s written for a juvenile audience, and the art is really beautiful and full of creative details.

H picked out three books in a series called Songs of Our Ancestors, by Patrick Atangan. They are stylistically illustrated stories from Japanese, Chinese and Indian folklore: The Yellow Jar, Tree of Love, and Silk Tapestry. They’ve been good reading for the boys on our trip.

I’ll fit one more in here that I’m reading now: La Perdida, a contemporary story of a young woman who expats to Mexico and makes some big mistakes picking friends and generally loses control of her life over the course of a year. I’m not very far into it yet, but it is quite good so far: mainly about the main character’s naivete and idealism and they caused her to overlook things that she should be paying attention to.

I think I got it because it’s easier to pick up a graphic novel and become immersed when ones life is split into many 5-minute increments. I have a lot of novels/books waiting to be read, but these graphic novels are getting priority for their ease of entry/exit.

I’ll write another installment of Words With Pictures soon, focusing on the books I’ve found to read with my sons.